The Trials of Ho

For his "contributions to the struggle against imperialism," Moscow recently conferred the Order of Lenin on Ho Chi Minh. Last week Ho said no.

He asked for a delay "until the day when our people have driven off the U.S. imperialist aggressors and completely liberated our fatherland." Since that day does not seem imminent, even to North Viet Nam's intransigent leaders, Ho must wonder, at 77 and in none-too-vigorous health, whether he will ever wear Moscow's medal.

What will happen when Ho goes? For two decades his personality has provided the cement for one of the most stable Communist regimes in the world. Unlike China, whose collective leadership around Mao averages the venerable age of nearly 70, North Viet Nam's leaders are uniformly a generation younger than Ho. No matter who succeeds Ho, Western analysts see little hope of any major change in Hanoi's tough, tenacious policy.

Son of a Mandarin. The most likely successor to Ho as President is Premier Pham Van Dong, 59, who already presides over much of the government's day-to-day business and is by far the most visible man in the Hanoi hierarchy. The son of a mandarin who was the private secretary to Emperor Duy Tan, Dong became a nationalist during his student days, and in 1925 went to Canton and joined Ho, who was already training Communist cadres for revolution in Viet Nam. They have been together ever since. Dong headed Ho's delegation at the 1954 Geneva Conference, was made Premier in 1955. It was Dong, speaking before North Viet Nam's 366-man National Assembly in 1965, who first spelled out Hanoi's now famous "four points" for the settlement of the war, stipulating U.S. withdrawal and a neutral, reunified Viet Nam "in accordance with the program" of the Viet Cong.

After Ho, North Viet Nam may well inherit a Russian-style rule by collegium. With Dong as President, the party chieftainship now held by Ho would likely go to the shadowy Le Duan, 59, the Central Committee's first secretary and chief whip behind North Viet Nam's attempt to seize South Viet Nam. General Vo Nguyen Giap, 56, the Defense Minister and man in charge of North Viet Nam's armed forces, would almost certainly join Dong and Le Duan in any leadership troika.

It was once fashionable among Hanoiologists to divide the North Vietnamese leadership into hawks and doves, hard-lining pro-Chinese and more flexible pro-Moscow factions. The pressures of all-out war have long since buried such fine distinctions, if they ever existed at all. All the evidence coming out of Hanoi indicates a unified opposition to negotiations of any kind and for any purpose with the United States. As for his divided allies, Ho always scrupulously praises both Russia and China in the same breath, even though Moscow insists that it is now providing more than 80% of North Viet Nam's wherewithal to carry on the war under U.S. aerial pressure.

Rotting Cargoes. That pressure went up one more notch last week when U.S. planes for the first time bombed a boat-building and repair yard near the center of Haiphong, adding a new target to the overall effort to isolate the port city. Air Force photographs show that each day Haiphong looks less and less like a working port. As many as a dozen ships flying British, Russian and Polish flags are frequently tied up waiting to unload. Cargoes are stacked up, rusting and rotting, on the docks and jammed under every bit of covered space. All four bridges leading out of the city, which is essentially an island, have been bombed into the water.

Nature is also working against Haiphong. Much like New Orleans, Haiphong harbor silts up rapidly and must be dredged frequently to keep its channel navigable. No large dredges have dared work for the past two years, and already the bottom has built up an average of six to eight inches, so that at low tide docked ships already rest on sludge in places. Even when the North Vietnamese succeed in getting their vital supplies out of Haiphong, systematic U.S. bombing has raised other obstacles. Of the 14,000 trucks that Hanoi has received from Russia in the past three years, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, 9,000 have been destroyed by bombing.

Ho and Co. fully expect--and have so informed recent visitors--that before the war is over Hanoi and Haiphong will both be leveled to the ground. The North Vietnamese have built a cave-dwelling system for Ho and the government in the Thai Nguyen hills north of Hanoi. Ho already spends a good deal of time there.

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